More Australians drown in rivers every year than at beaches, pools or any other water source but surprisingly little has been done to work out how to change that.
That's the conclusion Royal Life Saving Society Australia's national research manager came to after digging into hundreds of papers on drownings from all around the world.
Research and policy national manager Amy Peden said statistics showed swimming in rivers, creeks and streams was more risky than driving a car.
"Road traffic is a bigger issue in terms of number of deaths than rivers but when you look at exposure, and you look at how often you're in a car compared to in the water and then how often things can go wrong, actually your risk of drowning in the river is higher than a car crash because of the amount of time you're exposed to that risk," she said.
But out of the hundreds of drowning studies she looked at along with James Cook University Associate Professor Richard Franklin and Professor Peter leggat, only 29 fit the criteria for their literature review into river drownings.
The PhD candidate said she was "a little" surprised by the lack of focus on preventing river drownings, both in existing research and generally.
"I think because of the sheer nature of river drowning deaths, they often occur in quite isolated locations or in rural locations so they don't get a lot of the media attention that a beach drowning death, you know at a Bondi Beach, or unfortunately a tragic death of a young child in a backyard pool (would get).
"So although I'm quite familiar with the statistics, I think a lot of people would be quite surprised to hear that rivers are the leading location."
More people died in the Brisbane River than any other water body in Australia, outside of the Murray River in the past 10 years, an analysis by RLSSA revealed in October.
In that same period, an average of 78 people died in rivers every year, versus 48 at beaches and 41 in swimming pools.
Of the 29 studies, only 10 investigated options for preventing river drownings and just one of those made any attempt to evaluate their effectiveness.
Ms Peden said it was "vital" for more to be done to prevent the tragic accidents.
"You only have to look at the statistics to see just what a big issue it is and just how big a role they're playing in drowning deaths," she said.
"Every drowning death is preventable and every drowning death is a family and a community that's lost someone and an incident that didn't need to happen."
The literature review identified many of the same causative factors in drownings as the Royal Life Saving Society Australia's yearly reports.
They recognised, age, gender, and alcohol consumption as major contributing factors, although many failed to agree on which age group was more vulnerable.
Ms Peden said the review, part of her PhD research, showed more needed to be done to find out why people drowned and how to prevent it.